Salt, Light, and the Vocation of Israel
Salt, Light, and the Vocation of Israel
Always in the Bible, God’s ends are universal, but His means are particular.
I’ve long puzzled over Matthew 5:13-16, that portion of the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus tells his audience, “You are the salt of the earth” and “You are the light of the world.” Commentaries tend to focus on the subjects of these metaphors: salt and light. Less attention is focused on their objects: the “earth” (gé) and the “world” (kosmos), as they’re often translated.
These latter two words hold the key, I think. They serve as verbal hyperlinks to the Hebraic background against which the sermon is set. And properly understood, the salt-light metaphor is about the vocation of Israel. It is about a particular people whose faithfulness to the divine covenant is a model of salvation for the world.
Salt of the covenant, light to the nations
Start with reference to “the earth.” Jesus uses this term earlier in Matthew 5, when he says “[the meek] will inherit the earth” (5:5). It’s a deliberate echo of Psalm 37, where David rejoices that “those who hope in the Lord” and “the meek” will “inherit the land.” And for the Psalmist, as for Jesus, “the land” isn’t generic geography or the earth as a whole. “The land” is specific. It’s particular. It is “the land” that God shows Abraham and promises to his family. It is the land of Israel. Every Jewish listener of Jesus’s words would have grasped this.
So when Jesus says, “You are the salt of the earth,” a better rendition perhaps is, “You are the salt of the land.” The phrase is geographically specific. Jesus is rooting his followers to a particular place, giving them a mission tied to that place.
What, then, of salt? In the biblical understanding, salt is a preservative and a symbol of permanence. Salt is the sign of God’s covenant. Thus, Leviticus 2:13 enjoins Israel to “add salt to all your [sacrificial] offerings” because it is “the salt of the covenant of your God.” Numbers 18:19 speaks of the “everlasting covenant of salt before the Lord.” And by the time of the Davidic monarchy, the metaphor has a geographic dimension. The Chronicler tells us, “Don’t you know that the Lord, the God of Israel, has given the kingship of Israel to David and his descendants forever by a covenant of salt?” (2 Chron. 13:15).
Understood biblically and against the Hebraic background, the phrase “You are the salt of the earth” has the following sense: “You are the sign of God’s covenant with this land and people—with Israel.”
But Jesus doesn’t stop here. He goes on to say in Matthew 5:14, “You are the light of the world.” Here, he recalls the prophet Isaiah, who promises that God will “gather” and “bring back” Israel and make them a “covenant people” and a “light to the nations” so that God’s salvation will “reach to the end of the earth” (Isaiah 42:6, 49:5-6). For Isaiah, the particular is bound up with the universal. God’s salvation and the restoration of His people are meant both for them and for the world.
God’s salvation is for all nations, of which Israel is the firstborn, the prototype, the model. Always in the Bible, God’s ends are universal, but His means are particular.
So when Jesus tells his followers, “You are the sign of God’s covenant with Israel” and “You are the light to the nations,” he was, in one sense, saying nothing new. His audience knew the Law and the Prophets. They understood that God had linked Himself to a particular people so they could bear a universal message. This was and is the historic vocation of Israel—to be God’s covenant people for the sake of the world.
What Jesus stresses is the personal nature of this vocation. It is not merely a corporate calling. The people of God are to embody this vocation in themselves. Each of you is a sign of God’s covenant. Each of you is a light to the nations. This is the sense of the Greek in Matthew 5, where the “You” in each injunction carries extra emphasis: “You yourselves are the salt. You yourselves are the light.”
Embodying the covenant for the sake of the world
Mapping the salt-light metaphor onto the historic vocation of Israel makes better sense of the Hebraic background to these phrases and syncs up with Isaiah’s vision for God’s people—a prophetic vision that Jesus would draw upon repeatedly in his teachings.
Thus understood, the metaphor conveys a familiar paradox, a tension between particularism and universalism that is a persistent theme of Scripture. This theme shows up everywhere. It’s in Zechariah 8, where the restoration of Israel draws the nations of the world to Jerusalem. It’s in Simeon’s song in the Temple, where he declares that God’s salvation is “for glory to your people Israel” and “a light for revelation to the Gentiles” (Luke 2:31-32). It’s in Romans 11, where Paul famously wrestles with the paradox—which he sees his life as embodying in a way—and finds it ultimately “inscrutable” (11:33).
Reframing the salt-light teaching in terms of Israel’s vocation also illuminates other parts of these passages. Jesus’s warning against the salt “losing its saltiness” echoes the constant biblical warning not to forget the covenant (Deut. 4), not to forsake that which makes Israel distinctive (Ex. 19:5-6).
And the “city set on a hill” that Jesus references is, again, not generic geography or a metaphorical place. His listeners knew this to be a real place, a particular city. It is Jerusalem. More specifically, it is that city’s crowning edifice: the Temple atop Mt. Zion. In Zechariah’s vision, God will “retur[n] to Zion and will dwell in the midst of Jerusalem,” where “the inhabitants of many cities” and “strong nations” will flock “to entreat the favor of the Lord” (8:3, 21-22). Isaiah foresees God bringing righteous foreigners “to my holy mountain,” to the Temple, which “will be called a house of prayer for all nations” (56:6-7). And in Luke 2, it is in that very spot where Simeon proclaims God’s salvation for Israel and for all the world.
The scandal of Israel’s vocation
And yet, these prophetic visions remain, in some sense, unfulfilled. This leads to a final insight from our reframing of the salt-light metaphor: God’s calling of Israel scandalizes all of us, though in different ways, at different points in history.
To a first-century audience, it was the universal that was scandalous. For God’s covenanted people, laboring for centuries under the yoke of oppressive and wicked Gentile regimes and longing for the promised restoration of Israel, to hear that God’s salvation was dawning upon these nations—that was tough to swallow. Paul called it a “stumbling block” (1 Cor. 1:23).
While this isn’t evident in Matthew 5, by the end of the book of Acts, it’s a clear point of division. Paul arrives in Rome, carrying news of God’s salvation—“the hope of Israel,” he calls it (Acts 28:20)—right into the heart of Gentile empire. And in the coup de grace, he accuses his Jewish audience of being hard-hearted. “Let it be known to you,” he says (his final words in the book), “that this salvation of God has been sent to the Gentiles; they will listen” (28:28). Many, understandably, couldn’t accept this. What they heard Paul saying was: “God’s eternal promises to Israel are being sidelined. Your project is taking a backseat—or worse, it’s being replaced.”
This didn’t sound like both/and—both Israel and the world. It sounded like either/or. And in a contest of either/or, God had already picked sides. He had chosen Israel.
But to a twenty-first-century audience, it is the particular that is scandalous. For Christians, standing on the cusp of centuries of “Christendom” and bearing witness to a faith that revolutionized the world precisely because of its universal message, to hear that God remains especially concerned with a particular people—with Israel—is also hard to swallow. For us, it’s no less a stumbling block.
So we come up with paradigms to explain it away. We relativize Israel, insisting there’s nothing special about it over against any other place and people—a kind of liberal internationalism applied to biblical theology. Or we go full-on supersessionist, substituting the Church for Israel and reinterpreting God’s covenantal promises as spiritual and metaphorical rather than physical, material, and geographic.
These paradigms are destined to fade in the clear light of Scripture. Israel’s covenant with God is “everlasting” (Gen. 17:7), its vocation “irrevocable” (Rom. 11:29). The prophetic vision of a restored Jerusalem, with the nations streaming up to Zion, remains a future hope, not a present reality. But when that future arrives, many Christians will struggle to accept it. They’re deeply uncomfortable with a God who unfolds, and is still unfolding, salvation history in and through a particular people.